Master Kong (known internationally as Tingyi Holding Corporation) is number one in market share in both instant noodles and ready-to-drink teas, with over $10 billion USD in annual revenue. While China has a rich tea culture, most sugar-free bottled tea on store shelves markets itself as “healthy” and “tasty.” Wanting to set itself apart from the competition by uncovering new consumer needs, Master Kong reached out to IDEO. Together, Master Kong and IDEO immersed themselves in modern Chinese tea culture and built a new, premium, sugar-free bottled tea brand that resonates deeply with contemporary tea drinkers. ‍

During research, the combined IDEO/Master Kong team took a two-pronged approach to uncovering new opportunities: industry exploration and consumer research. The team visited various tea-related businesses, from traditional tea houses to modern beverage shops, as well as “third place” tea spaces outside of home or work. They also conducted in-depth, in-home interviews with consumers with various levels of interest in tea, delving deeply into their daily routines to better understand their lifestyles and any emotional or functional needs related to tea.

The team discovered that the essence of Chinese tea culture resonated with contemporary consumers’ longing for authenticity, simplicity, and physical rejuvenation in their fast-paced lives. This insight presented a unique opportunity for Master Kong. Instead of positioning its new sugar-free tea brand as merely a “healthy alternative” to other beverages,  it could spark a meaningful connection to tea culture, seamlessly integrating into various moments of modern life.  

Armed with this insight, IDEO designers and dozens of Master Kong beverage team members participated in a series of immersive, hands-on tea innovation workshops. Teams of experts from R&D, marketing, supply chain, and other company departments temporarily set aside their job titles to explore, iterate, and refine dozens of new tea concepts that were commercially viable, feasible for mass production, and aligned with consumer needs. The cross-departmental collaboration allowed for a broad mix of perspectives, experiences, and expertise, enriching the innovation process.

The co-creation sessions led to a new sugar-free tea product and flagship brand called Cha De Chuan Ren (“Descendants of the Tea”), which celebrates fine, origin-sourced tea and the passion and dedication of tea farmers. The novel concept resonated strongly with consumers and was validated during subsequent rounds of quantitative market testing, ensuring its relevance and market potential.

Cha De Chuan Ren launched with two signature flavors: Tieguanyin (green tea) from Fujian and Pu’er (black tea) from Yunnan. The unique mottled bottle design pays tribute to traditional handcrafted glass containers and the handiwork of tea farmers. The tactile paper label, which features Jia Ma-inspired woodblock illustrations of local tea fields and tea farmers’ hands, nods to the artisanal craft of tea making and the source of the tea inside.

“Descendants of the Tea” debuted on Tmall in April 2024. It claimed the top spot on the commerce site’s Tea Beverage V-List in August and September. Offline, it launched in FamilyMart convenience stores in May and has since expanded nationwide. The new brand received a 2024 Red Dot Award for “Brands & Communication Design.”

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“We are honored to collaborate with IDEO, a global leader in innovation, as our strategic partner. ‘Descendants of the Tea’ is not just an exceptional product but also a tribute to the rich heritage of tea culture. Only by continuously integrating culinary traditions with innovation can we sustainably meet consumers’ true needs.”

Richard Chen
‍CEO, Master Kong (Tingyi Holding Corporation)

“Innovation is incredibly fragile. If even one leader is unsupportive or hesitant, the culture of innovation can collapse. I always encourage my team to take risks, as long as they’re not high stakes. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? At the very least, we’ll have a fair chance at creating something new.”

Wei Hong-Chen
‍Chairman of Master Kong Beverage Holdings Co., Ltd.

Sugary bottled teas were once very popular in China. Today, rising consumer demand for healthier beverage options has expanded the market for sugar-free tea.

#1

on Tmall’s Tea Beverage V-List, August- September 2024

2024 Red Dot Award Winner

‍for Brands & Communication Design

Twenty years ago, carrying a single-use plastic water bottle was a status symbol—no more. Growing awareness of the negative environmental impact of plastic pollution, combined with the adoption of healthier lifestyles and social media influencer trends, has made reusable water bottles “it” accessories for on-the-go consumers. While brands such as Stanley, Yeti, S’well, and Hydro Flask own the under-$100 market, fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, and Prada have etched out a new and growing market for high-end bottles that appeal to discerning, trend-conscious young people looking to perfect their hydration habits.

Spotting an opportunity to disrupt the predominantly utilitarian water bottle market, Steinmann partnered closely with IDEO, tasking the team with developing an industrial design that perfected the tactile and sensory user experience, from drinking and carrying to disassembling and cleaning thoroughly. The collaboration deepened over time, with Steinmann and IDEO working together to develop the high-level engineering concept, the OKAPA logo mark, and packaging ideas.

Key user-centered features of the OKAPA bottle include a medical-grade German borosilicate glass interior for superior taste of hot or cold beverages with no lingering odors; a Swiss-engineered thermoplastic lockable and leak-proof tilt cap that can be easily operated with one hand when driving or doing other activities; and an ergonomically shaped mouthpiece for a pleasurable drinking experience. Precision-engineered for maximum longevity, the inner glass bottle is suspended via a shock-absorbing system inside a bead-blasted, extruded, and anodized aluminum outer shell. Eight modular parts come apart easily for either a quick or thorough cleaning.

At its core, the OKAPA bottle elevates an everyday ritual through meticulous design and uncompromising engineering. Launched in January 2025, the new bottles are available in eight contemporary colorways curated by renowned color and materials specialist Beatrice Santiccioli (BSD), including Misti Pinku, Goldie Samba, and Fetishe Noir, among others.

In the US, the reusable water bottle market is estimated to increase from $10.2B in 2024 to $14.1B by 2031, with 69 percent of Gen Zers owning at least one. Customization trends, such as personalized design and branding, are anticipated to boost the market, ripe territory for disruptive startups such as OKAPA. (Persistence Market Research)

Once a practical accessory for hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, reusable water bottles have gone mainstream. Yet none check all the boxes in terms of purity of taste, hygiene, durability, functionality, and beauty.

8

modular pieces ensure hygienic cleaning is quick and easy

100%

recyclable materials in each bottle

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s mission is to interpret and conserve the earth’s biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science. Over its 110-plus-year history, its offerings grew to include everything from a quarterly magazine, popular websites and apps with millions of users (Merlin, eBird), partnerships with outside organizations, and the world’s largest database of photographs and audio recordings of birds. This abundance is a testament to the passionate enthusiasm of its employees. Still, it confused potential members and led to siloed internal efforts, preventing the Lab from advancing its urgent collective vision. “Birds and biodiversity are in peril,” said Executive Director Dr. Ian Owens. “We must take radical action with a coherent vision, united voice, and purpose.”

IDEO began by helping the Lab better define its audience. While primarily composed of people passionate about birds, IDEO discovered its larger audience was nature lovers interested in biodiversity, bioacoustics, conservation, and science. From there, IDEO created a brand strategy and architecture focused on helping the Lab streamline its efforts under the “One Lab” brand. The brand architecture visually articulated the relationship between Cornell University, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Lab’s many products and offerings. IDEO designed a comprehensive brand identity system to work across mediums, including a simplified logo system, new colors, type, graphic language, voice and tone, and key messaging.

When the Lab’s design team began implementing the new branding elements across its website and many digital products, it became clear that the organization also needed IDEO’s help in creating tools to facilitate cross-department collaboration. To better understand the day-to-day nuances of the organization, IDEO designers worked out of the Lab, co-creating a brand activation playbook. The playbook, launched in 2023, contains recommendations for new cross-functional working groups (partnerships, visual identity, and brand voice), as well as exercises and interactive tools designed to build trusting relationships, gain alignment, foster collaboration, and manage change at scale.

Post-collaboration, the Lab has applied the new brand across its website, apps including Merlin and eBird, Living Bird magazine, email and newsletter templates, and its line of merchandise. A new internal brand guidelines site has become central to employee onboarding, while new working groups are helping to bring down barriers between teams and spur collective action. Like a flock of birds, the Lab now sings one collective song.

The Cornell Lab’s 300+ scientists, professors, staff, and students were passionately dedicated to their individual team’s unique conservation projects, but segmented internal systems could stymie their collective impact.

1 brand

unifying 300+ employees and 8 departments

Founded in 2008, Ascend Public Charter Network prides itself on providing “rich, joyful learning experiences that unlock lives of boundless choice” for its students, 93 percent of whom identify as Black or Latinx. The organization is also proud of being Black-led: 78 percent of staff and 80 percent of the executive team are people of color. Using co-design and joy, IDEO held a mirror up to Ascend’s core optimistic spirit during a moment of anxiety and change, helping its new CEO, staff, students, and parents reflect a dynamic, collectively imagined vision.

While the project’s goal was serious, the combined team centered the collaboration on bringing back fun, beauty, and imagination to those who could use it most: educators. Through engaging interactive activities, the IDEO team invited principals, PTA members, student council representatives, and board members to join “organizationally sanctioned play” moments like creating collaged vision boards and writing poems about Ascend’s impact. These interventions helped burned-out educators escape the day-to-day tasks of running schools and dream expansively about Ascend’s future. The team also solicited written, visual, and audio stories, asking community members to describe Ascend at its very best.

Stitching together submissions from 551 students, 75 parents, and 16 staff members, the co-design sessions resulted in a powerful new purpose, mission, and values, as well as a vibrant visual language and activation tools to bring Ascend’s vision of a “dope,” “unapologetically Brooklyn” charter network to life. The joyful, eye-catching visuals are embedded throughout its 17 Brooklyn schools, staff recruiting and training materials, and digital presence.

Shortly after the collaboration with IDEO, Ascend received an unsolicited  $11 million donation from MacKenzie Scott's foundation, Yield Giving, the most significant gift the then-14-year-old institution had ever received. The pivotal funding will allow the organization, with its bold new “grown-up” vision, to focus on becoming the school of choice in Brooklyn by 2027.

In the summer of 2021, one in four K-12 teachers was ready to quit. Pandemic stressors and increased curriculum scrutiny were to blame, according to a 2021 Rand Survey.

In 2022, 44% of K-12 workers reported burnout, the most of any US professions the time, according to a Gallup Poll.

Pandemic exhaustion and leadership turnover left Ascend’s new CEO eager to align staff around an exciting new vision.

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$11M grant

Ascend received an $11M grant from the MacKenzie Scott Foundation a few months after the collaboration

1 collective vision

to guide a network of 17 schools

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We heard back from colleagues around the world with reflections on technology, identity, health, food, aging, climate, and more; then synthesized the observations into a series of glimpses into a near-future reality where meat is grown in a lab and remote teams holo-call into all their meetings.

At the moment, many of these patterns exist at the periphery of our lived experience, hinting at emergent realities. But as we head into what will surely be an eventful 2020, they can offer some clarity, set expectations, and trigger new thinking about where we’re going as organizations, as individual leaders, and as a society in pursuit of a bright future.

1. Attention Economy Backlash

We love our phones, but will they ever love us back? Despite round-the-clock connectedness, millennials are being called “the loneliest generation,” suffering endemic anxiety and depression as social media activity replaces in-person interactions. Along with our privacy and attention, we give away our data—which is for sale, but we don’t get the profits. Clickbait lures us with content that causes outrage, disgust, or anguish; but we click anyway, and that has measurable impacts on our mental and physical health (not to mention society).

Such concerns have spawned a movement to regulate big tech. We see it already in the growing practice among tech moguls of sending their children to Waldorf schools and insulating them from technology, even as it’s the root of their fortune. Meanwhile scientists at Northeastern University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are working on “adversarial T-shirts,” printed with a specific pattern that can confuse facial-recognition algorithms, thereby protecting people’s identity in surveilled public spaces.

As we watch these phenomena unfold, new questions help us begin to fill in our picture of the future: Will all organizations soon have a Chief Ethics Officer? Will “surveillance-free space” become the new “non-nuclear zone?” Will there be a course-correction in social media, where "positive antisocial" digital experiences emerge?

2. Multi-Track Mind

It’s increasingly common to have multiple careers, many side gigs, and several simultaneous committed relationships over the course of adult life. As digital tools become the means to finding work, partners, and new interests, the bios we use to present ourselves on social media reflect the hybridity and fluidity of the moment. Identity itself is often a composite that includes profession, religion, gender, family, geography, ethnicity, personal passions, and the list goes on.

These currents are already taking shape through organizations like Live in the Grey, which empowers people to blend what they like to do with what earns them a living. As AI replaces many tasks, there will be less need for full-time work, and employers may offer part-time roles to retain people.

To help think through these evolving identities and aspirations, we’re asking: Will banks have to design “rainy-day” funds as people increasingly lack one consistent stream of employment? Will universities have to create hybrid departments, teaching positions, and curricula sourced from multiple disciplines? Will people identify as both their physical and digital identities in the world?

3. Distributed Devotion

Although younger generations are less affiliated with organized religion, they have no less drive to find a sense of belonging, meaning, and spiritual connection. But they’re finding it in a much wider array of locations and communities. Yoga studios, supper clubs, and forest bathing all offer a sense of communion. Megachurches hold rock concerts and sell Starbucks; Kanye West has his own ministry. For some, transcendence can be found at CrossFit.

Sacred Design Lab, a research and design consultancy, explores how modern millennials “gather” to seek out meaning, community, and ritual in the absence of organized religion. The People’s Supper uses shared meals to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Intentional communities are having a resurgence among people who want to live and raise children beyond the nuclear family, and reduce consumption by sharing resources. One example, Kin, is a co-living concept specifically for people with young families.

This prompts us to wonder: Will brands soon have a Chief Belief Creator? Will micro spiritual sects replace organized religion? And will physically distributed workforces and the growing gig economy generate a new longing for community at work?

4. The New Normal

Transgression is the new norm. In large U.S. cities, cannabis has replaced alcohol for recreation and relaxation; psychedelics are administered in therapeutic settings; and gender is understood to exist on a spectrum. Aid in dying is now law in nine states (plus DC). This will be a slow moving pattern in many cultures, but is a fast moving train in many major cities.

Last year, Oakland, California unanimously passed a resolution to decriminalize hallucinogenic fungi, otherwise known as “magic mushrooms.” Aside from academic clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and elsewhere, German company ATAI Life Sciences and Compass Pathways (for-profit biotech platforms) are testing psilocybin and other psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is pioneering the use of MDMA for anxiety.

All this has us asking: Will cannabis corporations trade on the S&P 500? Will the option of assisted dying be part of any conversation on end-of-life care?

5. G.R.A.S.-fed*

The threat of climate-induced food scarcity is driving a rise in precision agriculture, analytics, IoT, and CRISPR gene editing. Indoor farming heralds a future where even food deserts can produce nourishment. Lab-grown meat and fish have arrived, as have molecular whiskey and wine.

Clara Foods is a so-called “cellular agriculture” company that produces egg whites without hens, using yeast to grow proteins that mimic the animal-derived version. Aleph Farms is growing cultured meat in a lab. And a company called Endless West is creating Glyph, a whiskey made in a test tube rather than a barrel, mapping the flavor profile at a molecular level and building the product in less time and with fewer resources than its traditional predecessor.

We wonder: Will GRAS become the new “natural” on food packaging? Will prehistoric life forms be replicated for contemporary consumption? Will prescription diets be the norm?

*The FDA’s acronym GRAS, or “generally regarded as safe,” is emerging as the framework for accepting scientifically modified food.

6. Peter-Panning

As boomers age, lifespans extend, and full-grown adults reject “growing up,” typical kid activities—video games, escape rooms, summer camp—are marketed to every age. Many millennials shun “adulting” and choose not to have children. Meanwhile, people are working into their 70s and 80s as “middle age” extends and salaries stagnate. Must we "do it all" in our 20s, 30s, and 40s only to peter-pan for 30+ years afterward? As younger people prioritize careers over children, perhaps hearty elders will do the child-rearing while parents play.

Google, Facebook, and other startups choose office design that mimics college dorms. Silvernest is an online home sharing service geared towards seniors. Papa, a service that bills itself as “grandkids on demand,” offers assistance and socialization for seniors. And in 2014, Google launched Calico, a billion-dollar longevity lab.

It begs the question: Will retirement plans have to be redesigned to accommodate longer work lives? Will multi-generational “village” housing become the norm? Will people upload their brains, holograms, and other likenesses to the cloud to gain a form of eternal life?

7. Blue Marble Thinking

Climate anxiety is real and it’s changing behavior. Swedish advertisements shame jet travelers. Consumers at the top of Maslow’s pyramid make decisions based on organizational ethics and potential waste streams. Corporations are being held to account by employees on every front, from sustainability to privacy; and “benefit corporations” (B-Corps) are increasingly common.

Technologies like Rumii allow people to collaborate in VR, preventing the need to travel to meetings, and Microsoft’s Hololens is developing holograms to stand in for in-person meetings. H&M, Everlane, Patagonia, and other clothing lines are focusing on circularity and sustainability in their supply chain.

In a climate-conscious, globalized world, what sacrifices might the West have to make to help developing economies catch up without the pollution toll? Will “Circular” become a product designation, like HE (high-efficiency) washing machines? Will Thunberg-activated youth drive new consumption patterns?

8. Skipping School

The fourth industrial revolution demands new skills, which entails different approaches to how and where we learn. Corporations have brought learning and development programs in-house. In some countries, the aging population means fewer college applicants. Students are also rethinking the investment in and financial burden of college, and instead heading to coding bootcamps; while budding entrepreneurs follow the Zuckerberg/Thiel route and quit school to launch and learn in startups.

Amazon and Salesforce are starting programs to train their internal employees for roles that are hard to fill. There is a profusion of coding bootcamps like CodingDojo, and institutions like General Assembly, that are reinventing vocational education and providing alternatives to college. Lambda School and Flatiron take the ROI of education literally, only charging after graduates find a job.

In the near future, will we see vocational education replace the B.A.? Will kids apply to Google straight out of high school? Will cities—alongside corporations—invest in reskilling their workforces with new guilds and trade schools? Will teachers end up ditching schools in favor of teaching for plum salaries in private industry?

Header image by Brian Pelsoh; illustrations by Joanne Cheung

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A few months ago, with the end of 2019 in our sights, a group of IDEO designers and researchers sent out a query to all of our studios and locations. We asked a simple question: What emerging patterns are you seeing in your work that few are talking about?

As an interaction design director at IDEO, I’ve seen teams fall into this trap countless times. Once you jump into building a product, it’s easy for the intricacies of features, backlogs, and bugs to take priority over the human problem you’re trying to solve. When I’m guiding multidisciplinary teams through product development, my goal is to anchor the user at the heart of the process, from ideation through implementation.

Here are some tips for helping design and development teams work better, together—and for keeping the user top of mind from concept to launch.

1. Let big needs inform small tasks

As a team transitions from design into build, it’s inevitable that the focus shifts to practical details. Most development teams that I’ve worked with use some version of an agile process. Teams identify a set of features to build in short sprints. These features are then broken down into even smaller bite-sized tasks. For example, in a digital build, tasks could include “a user can rotate an item” or “a user can skip a step in on-boarding.” When you're working at a level this granular, it’s easy to lose sight of deeper human needs.

One way to prevent this is to articulate and make visible the user goals that your team is trying to achieve. In a recent sprint, we identified our goals as, “Help users collaborate and share, inspire users to create content, and provide relevant advice.” The product manager wrote this statement on Post-its that she stuck to each team member’s monitor. Throughout the sprint, it was always visible and top of mind, and our team would constantly refer to it in conversation. We used it to prioritize our work as requests crept in to tweak features; if a request didn’t support the user goal, it was cut.

2. Make digital work physical

In addition to keeping user needs top of mind, it’s critical to also keep an eye on the holistic experience. When your team is moving quickly through sprints, there is a risk that it will build one group of features and quickly move on to the next without making a connection between the two. At a larger scale, product teams are often organized around features (such as check-out, product page, or search). If these teams don’t communicate, and no one owns the full experience, it creates a confusion for customers.

This is an instance where tangible visual reminders can be useful—in making your digital work physical. During a collaboration with an agile team, I recognized that we were losing sight of the full user journey for our product. I hunted down a large foam core board, printed out all the screens we had designed, and arranged them into user flows. The engineers were baffled by my paper-based technique, but it gave us view of the full experience. We scribbled on the printed screens, added sketches, and continually tacked up new versions. As we went deep on building certain features, we made sure to look across the system to ensure consistency.

3. Prototype while building

A common pitfall among product teams is to jump to a single solution and then tweak details through usability testing. This type of testing may reveal how a user best engages with an interface (do they expect to click or swipe?) but it may not prove that a feature meets core needs.

It’s beneficial to keep prototyping with users through implementation to ensure that the team is continually building the right thing. Take a few hours or a few days to throw together a quick prototype (with paper, a prototyping tool, or code) to de-risk the process and potentially save hours of development time (not to mention budget).

I worked with an online retail team that wanted to build a new feature that would respond to shoppers' desire for more targeted recommendations. The team had jumped to a solution based on the best technical solve—a feature attached to the user profile that mimicked a closet with drawers.

While the virtual closet was an easy tech solve, I questioned whether the complexity met the need. The team took a few days to do lightweight testing of multiple concepts. They discovered that shoppers actually preferred to receive tips while shopping. Eventually, we landed on a simpler solution that not only saved hours of development time, but created an experience that customers actually wanted.

4. Create one team

The best way to remain human-centered is to create a healthy overlap between design and development teams. Merging methods and rituals can be a messy process, but ultimately, it’s worth it. Engineers become open to creative problem solving and designers are willing to be more flexible with their ideas when they understand what it takes to build them. In the best case, a multidisciplinary team is located together in one space, and a designer can simply roll their chair over to an engineer to chat. When this is not possible, we do our best to make remote teams feel connected, in one case setting up a video “wormhole” between designers and developers in different cities.

Beyond co-locating, it can be surprisingly useful to intentionally create a shared culture and team identity. I came around to it after seeing many teams with awkward beginnings eventually bond around shared identity, jokes, and rituals. One project that I worked on brought together designers and developers from three different companies. They were tackling a mobility challenge, so they aptly named themselves “Mötormouth.” They devised a back story about a ‘90’s metal band, printed sweatshirts, and even took a break during a grueling sprint to take band photos. By the end of the project, I was convinced that this wacky band identity helped a diverse group work effectively as a team.

The best digital products are the ones that solve a human problem. And the best digital design teams are the ones that keep that human at the center of their process, from early ideas through final build. By combining disciplines, prototyping often, and allowing the user to guide decisions, teams set themselves up for success. And along the way, it's important to not neglect play—it may seem extraneous, but it’s the glue that bonds teams around a common purpose.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

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Picture this: You’re three weeks deep in a digital product build, under pressure to hit a launch date. You’re in the zone, typing out tasks and churning out features. But in the chaos, you start to lose sight of why these features matter. You pause, push back from your desk, and ask the team, “Wait, why are we building this feature again?”

The following oral history recounts that process, which has been defined by an unusual collaboration: Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA) manages the airport with a staff of 1400 employees, while the airport as a whole employs approximately 50,000 people across 400+ organizations. How do you bring them together?

The voices telling this story come from both sides of the relationship: Scott Collier is the Vice President of Customer and Terminal Services at GTAA, and Mike Ross is GTAA’s Director of Commercial Development. On the IDEO side, the project was led by Owen Rogers, a Partner and Senior Design Lead; along with Mat Chow, Director and Organizational Designer; and Nic Pajerski, former IDEO Design Lead.

Setting the Scene

In 2014, Scott Collier became GTAA’s Vice President, Customer and Terminal Services, a role that left him responsible for the Commercial and Terminal Operations of the airport—all of those things most visible and arguably most frustrating for passengers. He had an unusual background for an airport executive, having spent his career primarily at PepsiCo across North America.

WHY SCOTT TOOK THE JOB AT TORONTO PEARSON

Scott Collier, Vice-President, Customer and Terminal Services, GTAA: As a Toronto area native and an admittedly frequent traveller through Pearson, I was always fascinated by the incredible complexity of the airport, yet the apparent disregard for the interests and concerns of the traveling public. It felt as though every point within the travel journey was designed to frustrate the passenger, and, in most cases, for no apparent reason. I also knew that there are many industries that run hyper-complex operations but still manage to put the customers first. It seemed logical to me that we should be able to do that at an airport as well. If nothing else, it would be a heck of a challenge.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE AN AIRPORT?

Mat Chow, Director and Organizational Designer, IDEO: Toronto Pearson—or really any airport—exists to move three things: people, planes, and baggage. But ironically, airports are never organized that way. They’re siloed. There is very little ownership of the airport as a whole. But at IDEO we have this principle: we organize around the work, not work around the organization.

Nic Pajerski, Design Lead, IDEO: Airports are gnarly because everything is no one's responsibility. Or at least that's what it felt like.

Mike Ross, Director of Commercial Development, GTAA: I like to joke that it says "authority" on my business card, but we really don't have “authority” over anything. The many tens of thousands of frontline employees, working for over 400 companies, all have their own mandates, their own safety rules, their own way of operating. We just house and host them.

Scott Collier, GTAA: Think about the passenger's journey through the airport. Where do you park? How fast is the check-in process? Will my carry-on bag be allowed? How long does it take to get through screening? Are the bathrooms clean? The number of decision points are insane! And if any one of those steps starts to break down, you're done—and we’re done. Our performance falls apart and we have let the passenger down. If they're running to their gate—and we proved this—our passengers aren’t spending any money. We know for a fact that improving wait times by one minute translates into about a million and a half dollars for the airport in sales. It's crazy, but what is even more appalling is that no one cares. You can’t make this stuff up! So long story short, unless the entire enterprise is aligned around the one thing we all have in common—the passenger—we will never achieve our aspiration to be the best in the world. And that’s the cool thing about working for an airport: bringing all of the organizations together toward a common cause. That's the challenge. The question, therefore, was “How?”

The Kickoff

In 2016, IDEO and GTAA began working together to improve the airport, kicking off the project with an exercise meant to let everyone see the airport with fresh eyes. Armed with a checklist, the two teams went out together to observe how different types of people moved through the terminal.

AN EPIPHANY AT SECURITY

Owen Rogers, Partner and Senior Design Lead, IDEO: We walked around the airport for about four or five hours, and we would stop and watch. Scott’s very inquisitive. He'd say, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?"

Scott Collier, GTAA: I remember we were at domestic screening in Terminal One—our biggest. It was summertime. There are kids crying. And we see a mother losing her mind trying to keep her kids together while navigating through a massive wait line. It was so disheartening to watch her have to endure that in our airport. Welcome to Toronto Pearson! How do you like us so far?

Nic Pajerski, IDEO: She had a stroller and a baby in a sling, and her bags, and she was also trying to navigate the thing that everyone else is doing.

Owen Rogers, IDEO: We all stopped and watched. Scott’s team was with us as well. And they all kind of rushed over to help her—because that's what they do, they're customer service.

Nic Pajerski, IDEO: We had sent everyone out to do this design research activity as a team, thinking that they'd be able to dig deeper. But this was very demonstrative of how broken everything was. It was an enlightening moment: obviously the thing that we have isn't working. For everyone.

Scott Collier, GTAA: Owen and I were just kind of looking at each other and shaking our heads. And I said to him, “So, can you help us?”

Owen Rogers, IDEO: Scott seemed to realize in that moment, "Oh my God, this is what we're dealing with." But I said, "As a designer, all I see here is opportunity.” Airports have really driven themselves down to a place where—for a designer—there's nothing but upside. You could tweak the simplest thing and be heralded as a genius because it's so bad. I mean, they're all trying really hard, it's just, you know, they’re running around trying to fight fires the whole time. Nobody is actually stepping back and saying, “How can we make this whole thing better?”

WHAT IDEO COULD (AND COULDN’T) DO

Scott Collier, GTAA: Owen said to me, "We can work on this but it's a very different problem than you think it is.” And I said, “Oh really? What is it?” I'm thinking he's got the magic bullet. Instead he turns to me and he says, "The problem is you." And I go, “The problem is me? I'm new! I'm nine months into this! What do you mean?” He says, "You guys don't get it. You don't know how to empower this crazy place called an airport to get all the people who work here, the various stakeholders, the airlines, to work together. You act like an authority. You like to tell people what to do. And in this very complex ecosystem that's never gonna happen. So I can do this little project and we can come up with some suggestions. But fundamentally, unless you change the way you behave, and you demonstrate a willingness to others that you're going to think about this differently, you're wasting your time."

A CATALYTIC REALIZATION

Scott Collier, GTAA: Roughly 50,000 people work here. Over 450 different organizations. The airport authority is 1,500 people, and truth be told, we really don’t have much control over anything—although we delude ourselves sometimes into thinking we do. Our mindset was: We know better. We like to tell people what to do. We know what's right. But that wasn’t the right kind of leadership. It wasn't inspiring, wasn't passenger friendly, wasn't commercially successful. It had created an airport that was, quite frankly, not particularly effective. And it had to change. That one comment from Owen, that one sentence—"the problem is you"—was the turning point for me.

A Gnarly Problem

In 2016, IDEO and GTAA began their first project together, working to rethink the security screening process. But it soon became much bigger than that.

REGULATIONS AND RISK

Scott Collier, GTAA: In the U.S. you have TSA; in Canada we have CATSA (Canadian Air Transport Security Authority). At Pearson we had among the worst wait times in North America, certainly in the bottom 10% of any large airport. Worse, it was a horrendous experience. The staff weren't particularly friendly. Different sectors had different procedures. Different times of day were different. You never knew what you were going to get. Above all, our relationship with CATSA was broken. And their relationship with Air Canada, our flag carrier, was, to be blunt, toxic. We couldn’t have a conversation about improving things because we didn’t talk to each other at all! We talked over one another. And it was a real shame because the fact was all the people involved were really good folks. But I knew that unless we get our passengers through check-in and security quickly, they'll be running to the gates, they will be late, the airline's on-time performance will suffer, everyone is miserable, and it's a debacle all around. No winners, just losers. So it was kind of like, "I’ve got to fix this, but I have no idea where to start."

Mat Chow, IDEO: Airports are a place where safety and security is—and should be—the first concern. But that changes people's attitudes towards risk, and trying new things. When we started, we tried to encourage people to see the difference between taking risks unnecessarily—jeopardizing the safety and security of passengers—and challenging the status quo; not just doing things the same way because that’s how they’d always been done.

Owen Rogers, IDEO: When we first started working at the airport, whenever anything would happen—it could be a bit of paper on the floor, a light bulb not working, or god forbid an airplane crashing—everybody just points to someone else: "Wasn't me!" It was the biggest early insight we had. At IDEO, the way in which we design, the way in which we take on problem solving, is inherently collaborative. This wasn’t that.

THE MOMENT THINGS BEGAN TO CHANGE

Owen Rogers, IDEO: We had a workshop where we brought all the stakeholders together. We had groups of four to six people around a table. We'd framed the problem and we talked about it, but they're all pissed off that they have to be there. Their job is to run CATSA and it's really hard and nobody understands.

Nic Pajerski, IDEO: Going in, CATSA had this feeling that everyone in the airport kind of hates them, that their job is to be slow, to be meticulous, and it had built up into this kind of self-fulfilling aura. But then at the workshop, we presented all this inspirational work, and suddenly they get a lot of people outside of their organization thinking about their problems.

Owen Rogers, IDEO: We did one of IDEO’s creative exercises—we call it the spaghetti bridge—where we work in teams to build a cantilever out of spaghetti. Not one of them had done it before, and they started out suspicious. But next thing you know, they're all completely absorbed in the exercise! The yellow team wants to get the longest cantilever bridge! And the yellow team's winning! Everybody's whooping and cheering—and they don't even realize the CATSA people are working with the airline people!

Nic Pajerski, IDEO: By the end of the day, CATSA realized they had a lot of other people being sympathetic to the problems that they’d been dealing with all on their own. It was a powerful moment and a big milestone in the journey toward greater empathy and connection across disparate teams. This was the moment when human-centered design began to make sense across a large enough swathe of the airport population that it could take hold and start to facilitate change.

Owen Rogers, IDEO: So then we take the issue on: "What would you like to see the security experience of the future be like?" And they all lean into that question—together! And they make these amazing scenarios of what could be if, lo and behold, everyone works together and the passenger is at the center. Four hours later we finished this workshop, and the guy who ran CATSA stood up and said that: "Wow, if we could really put the passenger at the center of this, and we could all do this together, we could really change things." Up until that point, Scott and GTAA were measuring us on, "Have you solved it with your silver bullet?" And after that they understood, "This is about transforming our organization, writ large. This isn’t trying to fix baggage. This is about uniting the 50,000 people that work in this airport, regardless of which team they’re on." And that's where the second project came from.

Starting A Movement

A NEW MISSION STATEMENT

Scott Collier, GTAA: When I first arrived at GTAA, we had this nonsensical vision that nobody understood. So, thanks to Howard’s leadership, we put a new one in place. It was simple: our vision was to become the best airport in the world, which at the time was rather amusing because we were not very well regarded at all. We consistently ranked in the bottom quartile of any major passenger experience surveys (including our own)! We knew if we wanted to be the best airport in the world, we'd need to change the way we work, the way we think, and who we were ultimately serving. Instead of ourselves, we needed to all unite around our passengers. Our new mission statement reflected just that: "Passengers are our passion." I remember I got up in front of a crowd of our carriers, the airlines, and when I said it, they started laughing! They go, "Well, reallllly? The best? You've got a loooong way to go before you're that."

Mike Ross, GTAA: In the past we at GTAA had been the cops and the rule-makers and the ones who tried to put up all the signs that say, "Don't do this and don't do that." We knew if the airport experience was going to change, that had to change.

Scott Collier, GTAA: Fundamentally, we had been telling everyone what to do—just top-down. Instead, we said, "You know what? You guys know how to run this airport. You tell us how to do it.” We went to our friendlies—the commercial operators, the food and beverage, the duty-free retailers—and we said, “We don't want anything from you. We don't have a training program for you. We don't want any money. We just want to share an idea with you. And if you think it's a good idea, we'd like you to join us on this journey." We explained, we have this journey to become the best airport in the world. And we believe we can't be the best airport in the world unless we make you the best food and beverage retail operators in the world. And we want to start giving your people permission to start talking about it. We want to make your staff the heroes of Toronto Pearson. To a person, they signed off without any equivocation whatsoever!

GETTING PEOPLE ON BOARD FOR THE JOURNEY

Scott Collier, GTAA: IDEO asked us to think about how we—as the airport authority, just the 1,500 of us—could empower all 50,000 people who work here at the airport. How were we actually going to excite them? I realized that we had to change the conversation from "we" to "I.” Of course, at first everyone said, “That's not very Canadian," because Canadians are charmingly egalitarian. But I said, trust me on this, we've gotta figure out a way to make people personally accountable, and we can't go in and be the heroes on the high horse and say we're going to do it by ourselves. Until we start making people accountable for owning their business and doing what they say, this whole notion of going on a journey towards being the best will never happen.

Mike Ross, GTAA: There had been a very successful beer campaign in Canada called “I am Canadian,” and in the early days we were thinking of something similar to inspire that kind of spirit at the airport. But then IDEO prompted us to think about movements and see if we could make more than a campaign out of it, and really get something that was ground-up and not top-down. Ultimately we ended up calling that movement I Am Toronto Pearson.

I AM TORONTO PEARSON

Mike Ross, GTAA: We started with groups of ten people. We put them in a comfortable room and asked them to share their story of why they worked at the airport.

Scott Collier, GTAA: Calling it a “workshop” doesn't do it justice. We started a conversation. They started telling us stories about why they work at Pearson and their experiences with customers. These were front line people, these weren't middle managers and directors, these were everyday people who do the best they can, who struggle to get to the airport, and do magical things to make this place special. And just to watch them and see their pride was inspirational.

Mike Ross, GTAA: We learned that people could do the same work elsewhere—probably for more money and less hassle—but there was this pride in working at the airport, in such an emotionally charged place that moves millions of people a year. It turned out that this is a really sticky place to work. And that made people want to achieve that higher goal of being the best airport in the world.

Mat Chow, IDEO: I Am Toronto Pearson just played on what was already there: this deep sense of pride among so many airport employees for the human experiences they provided. You know, the airport can be this magical place of excitement—people are going somewhere or coming back, they’re meeting loved ones, there are these constant, intense, human-to-human connections. I Am Toronto Pearson gave people a moment to surface those human stories and really did tap into their pride in serving their customers, in serving Toronto, and really being ambassadors for Canada. When you're in the airport and you get to see the moments of gratitude and joy, that's incredibly infectious. Tapping into that broke down a lot of walls around the airport.

Scott Collier, GTAA: These first participants started to talk about it with their colleagues and it started to snowball! We learned as we went, and by the end of the year, roughly a thousand people had joined the movement. By the end of 2016, it was up to 5,000, and by the end of 2019, we will have 25,000 people as members of the club called I Am Toronto Pearson. It's remarkable.

Owen Rogers, IDEO: People went deeper than we'd ever imagined. They found reasons why they worked at the airport that even they hadn't seen. It was profound, the ability for so many people to truly show up. One participant shared that he and her family had fled a war in their native country and ended up in Toronto. She ended up getting a job at Pearson, and she recalled with gratitude the warm welcome her family had received there when they first arrived. Another employee spoke of her network of airport workers coming together to help find a child’s lost teddy bear—a moment that showed her how much individual workers care, and how much power they have when they work together.

CHANGING THE WAY THE ORGANIZATION THINKS

Scott Collier, GTAA: This was the key thing: creating a movement ultimately means changing the way an organization thinks. You don't show up to work to just grind away at the airport. You want to be part of something bigger than yourself. It's just extraordinary how powerful this idea is. It drives innovation. It creates better relationships. And—get this—it's damn good for business. I have become a believer. It works! But it takes courage, it takes leadership, and it takes trust.

More Gnarly Problems

APPLYING THE LESSONS TO BAGGAGE HANDLING

Scott Collier, GTAA: Well, they say imitation is the greatest form of flattery and some of my colleagues began to apply this approach as well. My amigos on the aviation side wondered, "How might I use human-centered design to reimagine how we do baggage?” Once again, we had a poor reputation for on-time baggage delivery, even though we at the “authority” don't handle any bags. So how do we engage the people who work on bags? How do we think about it differently to get them empowered and inspired?

Owen Rogers, IDEO: Scott’s counterpart Craig Bradbrook, Vice President of Aviation Services at GTAA, saw the work we had done together and called me into his office. He said, we're about to spend half a billion dollars on a new baggage system. And he drew this thing up on a whiteboard of like thirty-two stakeholders and said, “After all the work that I've seen you guys do, I've got to believe we're missing something. I want you to go and look at re-imagining baggage through a human lens.” We ended up changing things: different signage, cleaning up the washrooms, better lighting everywhere, new technology. But fundamentally it was about changing the culture of the people.

IT’S STARTING TO CATCH ON!

Scott Collier, GTAA: So something special is happening—the design-led movement is catching fire. One of my colleagues says, “Well, what about immigration?” So we think about a design project to help us reimagine customs and immigration. And another says, “We should do a design project on X, Y, and Z because this actually works!” But the best news is that the people who do the work are actually contributing to it. They're getting excited. Engagement scores are going up, performance scores are going up. Human-centered design and the design thinking process are a force multiplier. When you get like-minded people in a room together, and you take away all the nonsense and egos, when everybody shows up without an agenda—which is hard to do!—it is remarkable how quickly you can design a solution rather than just band-aid a problem. But you have to have the courage to do this. Everybody thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, but you know what? We’re not. Trust your people. It's amazing the stuff they'll do.

Illustrations by Michael Meier

Toronto Pearson is North America's second largest international airport and far and away the busiest in Canada. But despite the completion of a gleaming new Terminal 1 in 2004, its passenger satisfaction scores—as measured by Airports Council International—remained dismal. Beginning in 2014, a new executive team, led by CEO Howard Eng, was determined to change those results. It began with embracing a new vision—admittedly audacious—of becoming “the best airport in the world.” For help, they partnered with IDEO, launching a journey of transformation that continues today, and has been marked by many surprising, illuminating, and sometimes hilarious moments.

On that day, they pulled us into a room that resembled a basketball court. Wide, open decks were marked by signs and little flags identifying team workspaces: Purchasing Boulevard, Operations Corridor, and Design Central. The walls of the space were adorned with customers stories, insights, and frameworks that had been collected during design research and now pointed toward new opportunities. At the center of the room sat a new kind of prototype of a vehicle, which had been the focus of a startup-style development team made up of members of purchasing, HR, legal, design, accounting and more. The process of creating the low-fidelity prototype had been entirely new for this cross-functional team—defined by collaboration and experimentation—but the prototype that now appeared before us proved the value of their approach.

This was just one of dozens of war-rooms now filling the buildings of Ford's Dearborn campus, and also in Ford’s campuses around the world. This new kind of problem solving and rapid prototyping were new to the greater Ford team. And while the IDEO team had been alongside Ford through many projects, we had not touched this prototype.

When developing a new vehicle, defining the concept is a significant investment in time and resources. Using this approach, the team achieved a massive reduction in design development time, in turn reducing cost to the company and accelerating the time to market. It was a light-bulb moment for us. We suddenly saw that a comprehensive organizational change was in motion here—design thinking now lived in Ford’s DNA and they were taking it forward.

Over many years of deep collaboration with designers at Ford, we’ve worked primarily on specific projects or initiatives, all the while broadening our points of connection within the company. Early on, the IDEO team functioned like a pirate brigade on the edge of the business, with a mandate to run fast and break the rules—but you can’t scale that up.

Where scale has been achieved is in the aggregate, as numerous individual projects have exposed more and more members of Ford to the power of human-centered design. Although we did not do the work to create some of the vehicle prototypes we viewed that spring day, our deep collaboration with Ford over many years has helped enable the organization to shift its way of working, and that may be the greatest and most lasting success of our partnership. Together, we’ve moved with Ford toward the precipice of becoming a new kind of company, suited to lead not just auto manufacturing, but a radical revolution in mobility.

Mapping the entire span of our time with Ford, it’s clear that the way we’ve been working is its own kind of strategy. Design thinking has been permeating the organization system-wide, often spearheaded by inspired employees eager to explore new ways of working. At its best, design enables people to tackle complex, systemic challenges. Within a large organization, the work isn’t so much about applying a process, but helping the company itself improve its resilience and uptake of new ideas. We can push the edge by asking tough questions about what people—the customers or users of their products and services—really want, and figuring out what needs to change in order to fulfill those desires.

That unifying anchor point during this shift has been Jim Hackett, who took over as Ford’s CEO in 2017. Hackett came from Steelcase, a world-class furniture company that has been instrumental in applying design to shape the future of work. It was at Steelcase where Hackett first worked with IDEO, and through that collaboration cultivated an approach to business that put the customer at the center, evolving the company from simply a furniture manufacturer to a hub of leadership in the changing workplace landscape. When he came to Ford, he brought this human-centered approach with him.

The whole purpose of a business, ultimately, is to meet a customer’s need. Many legacy businesses that have been operating decades or centuries find themselves with very established business models. They know how to make money through those methods. But the consequence of entrenched models is that everything drives toward efficiencies and returns. If you live in that mode, you lose your customer. It’s easy to say legacy companies need to change the lens through which they’re viewing and operating their business; it is everything to get it done well.

During his tenure, Hackett has built an ecosystem that enables design to spread from the core innovation teams out to all corners of the more than 190,000-person organization. Creating change is about convincing networks of people to make different choices, which means unconvincing them of their current behaviors and helping seed the potential of doing things differently. By helping them align in new ways around ideas, they gain the bravery to make choices that may not be supported by their corporate or cultural DNA.

In an effort to be more intentional and comprehensive with this diffusion of ideas, Ford is moving forward with two primary initiatives: First, a global design lab network called D-Ford, with teams around the world focusing not on products, but on customers. And second, a robust, enterprise-wide learning program to give everyone at Ford access to the design tools and skill sets that the collaborative team of Ford and IDEO spent years refining together. With these two efforts in operation, design thinking can be disseminated from the inside out, spreading throughout the organization.

Ford’s global innovation labs represent the design-intensive core of the company. The D-Ford studios are housed in Detroit, London, Palo Alto, and Shanghai. In each, a nimble group of design practitioners gets their hands dirty iterating, fixing, and prototyping possibilities for the next era of mobility.

To be human-centered doesn’t just mean to put humans at the center of the design problem, but to put humans at the center of the design solution and empower them in different ways. The D-Ford Labs, and the associated learning program, are creating a radically new way of working that is accelerating Ford's evolution. It's not IDEO, it's not Ford, it's a third way.

Outside of these hands-on labs, the uptake of design thinking is more variable and sometimes controversial. Thousands of employees cross paths with the small group of radical experimenters so transformation happens more slowly. Communicating the value of design in this broad population requires moving from provocation to persuasion and proof, demonstrating how much leverage design can provide in solving problems that have seemed intractable through more conventional approaches.

Design requires being on the ground with the people who will use and experience any new offerings from Ford, but it also means reaching across aisles and opening dialogues where previously deep, daily collaboration has been unheard of.

This never would have happened had they not felt invited into the room to help with the design. Having cross-functional teams from engineering, design, purchasing and more, has been a breakthrough, because they gain empathy and respect for each other’s practices and work together, rather than sitting in silos that tend to block each other’s effort.

Perhaps one of the clearest proof points for Ford’s new way of working is the groundbreaking, all-electric SUV Mustang Mach-E, which was unveiled in Los Angeles late last month. The Mustang Mach-E came to life just a few blocks away from Henry Ford’s first factory in Detroit, through a development process grounded in human-centered design, concentrated entirely on customer needs and desires.

The development team, called Team Edison, was made up of broad expertise, including members leading the design, charging strategy, infotainment, and marketing of electric vehicles. Thanks to the company-wide shift toward human-centered design, Team Edison was truly able to exercise creative license and operate in a different way. The Mustang Mach-E represents change not only within Ford, but worldwide. Customer outlooks and desires are evolving, and by listening to what’s true for their user, the team created a vehicle that aligns with the changing world.

While this new mindset is thriving within the walls of the labs, it’s a feat to communicate the nuance and potential of human-centered design to parts of Ford where design itself isn’t necessarily top of mind. Across every level and department, the principles can apply, but putting them in context matters. In order to activate that deeper saturation, Ford has developed an internal learning program that guides employees through the different phases of design thinking. From teams assembling child safety seats in Nanjing, to a Dearborn group researching the nighttime patterns of taxi drivers, to sales representatives in London, Design Thinking at Ford unifies people across the organization around the mission of putting humans at the center of their work.

The learning tools and experience are available to anyone at Ford who wants to better understand design. Practical tools include methods cards that can be applied at intervals in the development process, and videos illustrating how design thinking has come to life at Ford in the past.

Ford believes that all of its employees will benefit from a human-centered perspective, and is making progress in its enterprise-wide effort to create a unique, design-led creative culture.

One of the most exciting aspects of the early learning about design is realizing just how many areas it encompasses. From making autonomous rideshare vehicles to designing an ecosystem of connected services around sustainable transit, human-centered design in particular enables individuals to rethink how they go about their lives and how they look at the world around them.

As a designer, I was always taught it’s valuable to be able to say, I designed that—it’s on a shelf somewhere. Now we’re getting to a moment when it’s more valuable to create impact and influence rather than an object in space. We’re beginning to see new ways to measure impact, and better ways to affect change.

If you teach people to question what they do, and to collaborate and take cues from others with diverse skills, they will learn to change on their own, and the company will follow suit. This is how large-scale transformation happens. This radically different approach is what will determine the future of Ford.

Illustrations by Johan Papin

On a warm spring day in Dearborn, Michigan, where Ford Motor Company has its world headquarters, our team met up with some of Ford’s senior leadership. It’s a visit we’ve made regularly during the 15 years IDEO has worked with the century-old carmaker.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.